I am a retired college faculty in Philosophy, with specializations in Ethics, Socio-political Theory and Rational Choice/Decision Theory. My teaching focus was on Business Ethics, Medical Ethics and Logic. After retirement I freelanced as a Grant Writer/Fund Raising Consultant. I have taught at... More

Seems like the market was a mixed bag of tricks last week -- on the whole, the Dow and the S&P did well, but not every stock contained therein did as well as others.

Let's look at the Dow groups:

(click to enlarge)

The Dogs managed to erase any gains the Pedigrees made last week, and, for the most part, the difference seemed to boil down to two companies: Hewlett-Packard Company (NYSE:HPQ) in the Dogs, and Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ:MSFT) for the Pedigrees. HP seemed to get back to its winning ways, pushing ahead ~ 650 BPS - a nice one-week gain. Microsoft, on the other hand, managed to limp to a loss of 314 BPS.

How about the S&P 500:

(click to enlarge)

Here, the Dogs managed to make up some of the distance between their performance and that of the Pedigrees. On the Dogs' side, this is due mainly to two companies: R.R. Donnelley & Sons Co. (NASDAQ:RRD) and Cliffs Natural Resources Inc. (NYSE:CLF). Donnelley was up by a noteworthy 550 BPS +, while Cliffs exploded for an impressive gain of 939 BPS - a very good week for a company that has had its problems so far this year.

For the Pedigrees, the only real bright spot was Analog Devices Inc. (NASDAQ:ADI), which jumped up by 425 BPS; the other Pedigrees performed passably well with a mixture of small gains and small losses.

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